Hi,

I have been experimenting with converting a movie avi using Studio 7 and TMPGenc. I now have about 6 MPEG/s of the same movie on my hard drive.

With the Studio 7, I used two settings - first I used their default DVD setting. It came out much smaller than they anticipated (3,042,806), so I upgraded the settings in their custom box (basically I left everything the same but increased the data rates to maximum). This came out as 3,455,488.

Next I tried TMPGenc using the defaults and then the 2 VBR with settings recommended somewhere on this site (max 8000, min 3000, avg 6000, high quality). TMPGenc warned me that the file was going to exceed 4070, but I made it anyway (It took 8 hours). It was 4,346,501. Movie factory would only recognize the first 15 minutes of the movie, so maybe the size made it unrecognizable. So I let TMPGenc reduce the size to make it under 4070.

Question - in TMPGenc, where is it better to make the size reductions - as a reduction in the data rate (when choosing the VBR or whatever settings) or to make the % change when it says to make file a % of disk size? Basically, I don't know what these settings mean, so when they need to be changed, I'm not sure what is important and what can be sacrificed.

Was this size thing a fluke? Or does it need to be below 4070 to work? It seems as though that is wasting space. How much space can the menu take up?

Is there a difference between 4:3 525 line (NTSC) and 4:3 525 line (NTSC, 704x480) in the select source/expert settings box?

Should I be selecting full screen or full screen keep aspect ratio (or another)?

How do you judge quality or results of the MPEGs? Playing on my computer software, they all look about the same, maybe a minor difference. Will the difference be visible on the DVD on TV?

Any other suggestions for using TMPGenc? Maybe I'm going about this all wrong. Thanks for any help,

Deb